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Thursday, December 22, 2011

Un Blog Sobre Idiomas

In the U.S. of A. nowadays, we see lots of stuff written in
both English and Spanish. I guess that’s okay, because it helps our immigrants
from south of the border. If I were to visit their country, I’d like to see
signs and instructions in my language. (I would, of course, try hard to
learn theirs if I were staying long-term… just sayin’)

Here’s a sign I saw at a hospital sign-in desk recently:

I wouldn't expect a Spanish speaker to understand terms like “disability” and “ancestry”
and “conditions of admission" in English. Since this hospital gets the occasional Hispanic patient,
they’re wise to give the instructions in both languages.

Similarly, our local Best Buy store has a sign that warrants translation, because it has some pretty difficult words on it:

But this translation business can go too far. I recently filled out a form that was labeled in both English and French. It asked for lots of basic information, including the following:

Last Name / Nom

First Name / Prenom

Time / Heure

Religion / Religion

Date / Date

Disposition / Disposition

I’m not sure all of these needed to be translated, but they all were, for the sake of consistency, I guess. Consistency is nice, I just think they could have saved the ink.

Another sign in Best Buy really makes me say "Huh?!" It's over their MP3 and iPod department:

If you can understand no written English at all, I think you
could still grasp that “MP3 & iPod” means “MP3 y iPod.” Maybe it isn’t
just consistency that drives these decisions. Maybe Best Buy’s reasoning in
designing this sign went something like this:

We must translate it into Spanish, or our Hispanic
customers will be lost! They’ll search in vain for the MP3s and iPods. They’ll
surely give up and leave the store without making a purchase, because in their
language, “&” is “y.” No, it’s unacceptable to print only “MP3 & iPod.” We must render it in both languages, replacing the “&” with a “y.”

Guapo, you may be right about the tradition with French on diplomatic papers.

So, you haven't found lots of chances to use that phrase with Russian people you meet on the street? At least you made an effort to improve intercultural relations by learning a little of their language.

I have family members that speak Frisian, but all I know are cuss words and how to say "Grandpa's little sweetheart" (which I wasn't). When I went to Paris, I learned a very important phrase: "I am Canadian." (It was shortly after the US declared war on Iraq--there were riots in Paris.) Anyway, it didn't end up mattering where I said I was from, because I was traveling with a guy who looked so French I watched a girl break her bike under the Eiffel Tower so she could ask him to help her fix it.

I don't really know where I was going with this, so, you know...er...Merry Christmas!

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Brian, the author of Unintimidated by Convention, actually lives quite conventionally as a middle aged, middle class, 170 pound, 5'11" white Mormon. He is married, has 4.0 children and one large dog, and drives a minivan.
Brian enjoys daydreaming, photography, tinkering with mechanical things, sitting around campfires, and studying poetry. He doesn't eat mushrooms, if he can help it.
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